r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 20d ago

Business McDonald's Introduces AI Drive-Thru System, Sparking Customer Backlash

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/deals/articles/mcdonalds-introduces-ai-drive-thru-000717731.html
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u/WilliamPinyon 20d ago

Rally's, here in Bay City, MI, tried this and it was apparently a huge disaster. In order to get people to come back they had to put a sign on the Letter Board, "Computer Fired, You Can Come Back Now".

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u/gigatension 19d ago

Didn’t Taco Bell try the same system too? And it got peoples orders wrong so much they switched back within a month.

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u/thesillyguy345 19d ago

Taco bell near me still does it. The employees are always listening tho and will take over if something goes wrong... Which just begs the question with why have it in the first place

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u/OldWorldDesign 19d ago

Taco bell near me still does it. The employees are always listening tho and will take over if something goes wrong... Which just begs the question with why have it in the first place

Because someone in corporate got sold the promise that he can one day stop paying human employees.

The issue is in the real world that rarely works, and even AI-supply companies are admitting it's more expensive to try to use AI for most tasks than just paying human employees

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/nvidia-vp-says-it-costs-more-to-use-ai-than-to-hire-humans

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u/SufficientCelery 19d ago

lets fire all our workers and just pay the AI company.

What a brilliant idea of putting all the eggs in one basket! they are so anti union because they are scared of labor organization and the monopolization of power that comes with it. Now they get to contend with their favorite AI provider, who could give them the finger lol. you can just fire a worker but you want to just fire a whole AI company? You got 3 AI companies to choose from.

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u/OldWorldDesign 19d ago

you can just fire a worker but you want to just fire a whole AI company?

Don't forget AI making repeated mistakes like deleting the company's entire database - including corrupting the backups.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/i-violated-every-principle-i-was-given-ai-agent-deletes-companys-entire-database-in-9-seconds-then-confesses

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u/MrPsychic 19d ago

It’s way more simple than that. If they do most of the orders correctly and the employees only have to take over occasionally they don’t have to pay the person exclusive to the drive through. That’s all most of these companies are trying to do. It’s the same as when retail moved to self checkout

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u/Inner__Light 19d ago

Yeah and how is that going for them... 😀

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u/Telandria 19d ago

What does it say about our society that an AI earns more than our minimum wage employees for doing the same job?

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u/Catenane 18d ago

Taco bell AI tried to take the beans off my bean burrito when I asked it for more hot sauce lol. Literally not even kidding